[jinx]

from Time

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in the very same stadium where Semenya won her world title, rumors swirled that 100-meter runners Stella Walsh (nicknamed "Stella the Fella") and her rival Helen Stephens were men. After Stephens took the gold metal, the Olympics committee performed a manual check on her external genitals — and concluded that she was, in fact, a woman. And prior to the 1966 European athletics championships, female competitors were made to walk in so-called nude parades so that a committee could confirm their gender.

But Dr. Rob Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University and the author of "Intersex and the Olympic Games," a recent article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, says that determining someone's sex is not so simple, and that external genitalia can be misleading. A post-mortem on Stephens' body in 1980 revealed that she had "ambiguous genitalia." The post-mortem didn't go into specifics, but those genitalia could have been a small penis that was mistaken for an enlarged clitoris, or a small scrotum that resembled labia.


Ritchie notes that female athletes who in the past have been suspected of being men may have suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a person who is genetically male — that is, their 23rd chromosome pair is XY — is resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. As a result, the testes present in that person's abdomen never descend, and neither they nor their parents ever realize they are actually boys. Those with complete AIS will have a totally female body on the outside, but will lack ovaries and a uterus. Others may demonstrate partial AIS. "They are partly sensitive to the male hormone so they might develop some male characteristics," he says. "They may well be a bit more muscular and have facial hair."